The present invention relates to telecommunications management systems and, more particularly, to an enhanced traffic and capacity modeling process or tool for tracking traffic levels, and particularly traffic peaks, to facilitate planning for equipment and service growth.
Telecommunications facilitate the interactions which are necessary or desirable for many aspects of modern life, including business affairs, personal relationships, education, government functions, entertainment, and the like. Telephone systems function to establish a temporary electronic communication channel between a caller and a called party. A temporary communication channel, or call, is generally established between telephone lines of the communicating parties through “switches” which establish the particular channel and multiple line trunks which carry the communication signal between switches. The number of calls which can be simultaneously accommodated is limited by the number of switches and trunk lines available, that is, the total number of functioning switches and trunk lines in existence which are not currently occupied with calls or other “traffic”.
Traffic on communication networks can include signals carrying actual vocal conversations between humans, as well as data such as communications among distributed computer systems, electronic financial transactions, facsimile signals, internet “surfing”, email exchanges, network housekeeping data, and the like. New telecommunications technologies are emerging which will make further use of network throughput, such as on-line commerce, video teleconferencing, on-demand video entertainment, transmission of high quality medical images, remote control and monitoring applications, and the like.
Network traffic varies over time and date and by locality. Economics prevent network operators from providing even remotely sufficient capacity for all users to access the network simultaneously, since a large proportion of such capacity would be idle most of the time, constituting a wasted investment. In practice, telephone network operators attempt to provide adequate capacity to accommodate peak traffic, with some spare capacity to take care of unexpected traffic peaks, temporary local service outages, and short term growth. Operators of networks attempt to make the best use of existing capacity by efficient balancing of traffic loads through available switches and trunks by means of selective routing of calls. Because of the importance of activities supported by telecommunications and the volume of traffic, telecommunications network operators strive to maximize “up time” for components of the network as well as the technological quality of communication signals.
In the past, telephone network operators have typically analyzed usage data, derived from billing data, on a monthly basis for purposes of planning growth of infrastructure and service. Although a monthly accumulation of data has utility in planning service expansions and upgrades, the data does not show the volume of day-by-day traffic, much less hour-by-hour traffic peaks. A monthly total for a given customer does not show when, and to what extent, call peaks have occurred. At best, planners can make an educated guess at daily and hourly averages.
Certain types of businesses have high levels of incoming phone calls, such as companies which market products by telephone orders, companies which operate customer support services, certain government agencies, and the like. In order to effectively operate such services, such companies employ large numbers of phone lines to which are routed calls placed to one or more published telephone numbers, such as “800” type numbers. Such a technique is referred to as a dialed number identification service (DNIS). To serve their customers competitively, such companies may set answering goals, such that a customer's call will be answered within a certain number of rings. In order to meet such a goal, it is necessary to route the calls efficiently to available operators and to time the connection properly so that the customer's perception of prompt response is met. This further requires an adequate number of phone lines to handle the peak number of calls, an adequate number of operators properly trained, and call processing hardware and software.
The call processing hardware and software is most typically operated by a telephone network operator, or telephone company. Management of such calls is typically handled by a call processing “platform” which provides hardware for routing the calls and which records call data for billing purposes. The billing information is referred to as call detail records (CDR's) and, for toll-free type operations, include records of call attempts and usage minutes to each dialed number or DNIS. The CDR's are accumulated over a month for billing to the client company. In the past, capacity planning, both for the client company and for the telephone network, has been based on such monthly accumulations of recorded use. However, as explained above, a monthly record can be a very coarse tool on which to make planning decisions, since peak daily or hourly usage may greatly exceed a daily or hourly average of the month's usage.